A site for thinking about Contemporary American Fiction

Not Good Enough

This is completely running off of what Joe said, but after reading his post, it solidified how I felt about the narrator’s character. Here you have a guy who just wants to be the generic ideal of a man. He says himself that he wants a kid and a wife to own (as opposed to a wife to love.) By wanting to have these things strictly for possessional purposes, he sacrifices the intimacy that customarily coincides with them. He wants a house that he builds. He wants to eat food that he traps. However, at this point in the book, he is starting to realize he is outmatched in all elements of his existence. Where he can make things with his hands, his wife can sing better things. Where he can catch animals in traps, the bear rules them all. Where he wishes to have a son, his wife is incapable (or he) and what son she does bring forth into existence, he is unable to find love in or good enough to receive love. And to finalize the narrator’s inability to be good enough for one thing, the simplest of all things, to possess one’s own body, he does not. The fingerling has control of a majority of his thoughts, his desires, and his actions.